Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: ‘Knowledge Made for Cutting’
- Chapter 1 Mermaids Amongst the Cables: The Abstracted Body and the Telegraphic Touch in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 2 Enclosing Forms, Opening Spaces: The 1880s Fixed-Verse Revival
- Chapter 3 ‘The Newest Culte’: Victorian Poetry and the Literary Societies of the 1880s
- Chapter 4 The Time of W.E. Henley: ‘Minor Poetry’ and the 1880s
- Chapter 5 The Evolution of Point of View
- Chapter 6 Network, History, Method: Andrew Lang in and after the 1880s
- Chapter 7 Animated Conversations: Form, Transformation and the Category of the Novel in the 1880s
- Chapter 8 Henry James, Vulgarity and Transatlantic Moderation
- Chapter 9 He and She: The 1880s, Camp Aesthetics and the Literary Magazine
- Chapter 10 Men, Women and Horses: Public Spectacle in 1887
- Chapter 11 The Secular Turn in British Literature of the 1880s
- Index
Chapter 4 - The Time of W.E. Henley: ‘Minor Poetry’ and the 1880s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 October 2019
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: ‘Knowledge Made for Cutting’
- Chapter 1 Mermaids Amongst the Cables: The Abstracted Body and the Telegraphic Touch in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 2 Enclosing Forms, Opening Spaces: The 1880s Fixed-Verse Revival
- Chapter 3 ‘The Newest Culte’: Victorian Poetry and the Literary Societies of the 1880s
- Chapter 4 The Time of W.E. Henley: ‘Minor Poetry’ and the 1880s
- Chapter 5 The Evolution of Point of View
- Chapter 6 Network, History, Method: Andrew Lang in and after the 1880s
- Chapter 7 Animated Conversations: Form, Transformation and the Category of the Novel in the 1880s
- Chapter 8 Henry James, Vulgarity and Transatlantic Moderation
- Chapter 9 He and She: The 1880s, Camp Aesthetics and the Literary Magazine
- Chapter 10 Men, Women and Horses: Public Spectacle in 1887
- Chapter 11 The Secular Turn in British Literature of the 1880s
- Index
Summary
As the long shadow of Tennyson began to retreat in the 1880s, poetry found itself without clear directions for form or content. The temporality of the decade is a kind of anti-teleological anticipation--poets felt that something new needed to happen, but what that advent was remained unspecified. These conditions left a space for ‘minor poetry’, a term that implies not a position on a scale of value but a field of innovation and experimentation. This chapter first surveys the way this shifting ground is captured in anthologies, and discusses how the poetry of the decade resists easy capture in literary history. It then goes on to explore how the temporality of the 1880s is reflected in W. E. Henley’s ‘In Hospital’ sequence of lyric poems.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1880s , pp. 80 - 97Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019